An ignorance teaser

The most surprising finding in Fairfax Media’s recent poll
on voter preferences in the electoral referendum was that only a third of
voters confessed inadequate knowledge to form a preference among the
alternatives to MMP. If they were honest, both with themselves and with the
pollster, rather more would have disclosed not only a near complete lack of
knowledge of different electoral systems, but also a shocking level of
ignorance even about the workings of our current system.

Political ignorance is neither unique to New Zealand nor a
recent phenomenon. In a 1964 survey of Americans, only two years after NATO
stood at the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile
Crisis, a mere 38% of Americans knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO, the treaty
organization formed to defend the West against the Soviets. The broad consensus
of the international literature suggests voters know remarkably little about
their own electoral systems, about their systems of government, about the policy
positions espoused by different parties, about what the government spends money
on, and about the likely effects of policy.

The causes of widespread voter ignorance are reasonably well
known. Information is costly, and so people economise on it. Where the cost of
an additional bit of information exceeds the benefit I expect to draw from
learning it, I’ll do something else. We are all rationally ignorant about just
about everything – we all could, if we wanted to, learn a lot more about
everything from automobile mechanics to the history of the space programme. All
it costs is time, but time is precious. And, for most people, the benefits of
acquiring political information really aren’t worth the cost. We might learn
enough to avoid looking silly in conversations with our friends, keeping in
mind that they too are rationally ignorant.

What does this mean in New Zealand? The New Zealand Election
Survey asks, at every election, a few questions establishing respondents’ basic
grasp of the system. The 2011 results have yet to be released, but in 2008,
results really weren’t very good. A bare
majority of respondents correctly identified the party vote as being more
important than the electorate vote; a third thought they were equally
important, and the rest didn’t know. About a fifth of respondents did not know
that Labour was in government – they lacked even the basic knowledge necessary
for supporting or opposing the incumbent.

Among those respondents indicating a preference for MMP over
First Past the Post [FPP], about ten percent reckoned that a party earning
forty percent of the popular vote should earn more than half of the seats in
Parliament: a result more consistent with FPP. Among those supporting FPP,
about forty percent said that a party earning fifteen percent of the popular
vote should earn about fifteen percent of the seats: a result remarkably
unlikely under FPP. A quarter of FPP supporters also favoured coalition over
single-party government. It’s not wrong to favour either electoral system, but
it is a bit odd to favour options that work against the outcomes you think
important. It’s more than a little disappointing that, in the fifth MMP
election, voters understood so little.

The academic literature has moved from establishing the
basic facts of voter ignorance to debating its likely consequences: can voters
make sufficiently competent decisions to ensure decent outcomes? There are a
few ways this can happen. If voters who know very little cancel each other out
on election day – effectively flipping coins when at the ballot box – the
election then is decided by the choices of more informed voters and ignorance
does little to affect outcomes. Alternatively, the kind of political knowledge
embodied in answers to quiz questions may have little bearing on the choices
voters need to make at the ballot box; I would fail any quiz on mechanical
engineering, but that does not prevent me from making sound decisions when
buying a car.

Unfortunately, there is reasonable evidence that political
ignorance affects party and policy preferences, even after correcting for the
kinds of demographic factors, such as education and income, that affect
political knowledge. And, the effects are large. In analysis of the 2005 NZES,
I found that those with less political knowledge were substantially more likely
to disagree with the consensus of most economists on fairly basic economic matters. The NZES asked respondents whether, to solve
New Zealand’s Economic Problems, the government should control wages or prices
by law. I have a hard time imagining a single economist who would agree that wage
and price controls would solve any problem faced by New Zealand in 2005. But a
third of survey respondents supported wage controls; a fifth supported
generalized price controls. And lack of political knowledge was a stronger
predictor of disagreement with basic tenets of economics than was a lack of
education. Further, the more politically ignorant were more likely to support both
spending increases and tax cuts – either of which alone can be a defensible
preference, but which tend not to go well together.

We cannot do much to improve the general state of voter
knowledge. The incentives for individual voters to become well informed are too
weak and, for many voters, the costs are high. While many voters do take their
democratic responsibilities seriously and work to cast an informed ballot, the
evidence suggests a reasonably large proportion do not. What can we then do?
The evidence suggests that non-voters have, on average, less political
knowledge than voters; strenuous efforts to get out the vote then seem likely
to reduce the average quality of the vote. Further, when considering the
desirability of different electoral systems, we should put some weight on the
relative cognitive demands placed on voters. A good system will make it easy
for uninformed voters to support the incumbent if they like how things are
going, or to replace the government otherwise. At the margin, this lends
support to systems that elect single-party governments.